For many of his cases, this is true. I’ve got my eye on Justice Merchan, though. We’ll know in later November.
People barely research their votes, so I get it. But truly, not electing Trump should have been a no-brainer. Even if a person had no idea what a shitty person he was before 2015, Birtherism and Trump’s embrace of it should have been all anyone needed to know.
I think many if not most Trumpists celebrate and vote for Trump specifically because he is a shitty person. For many, it is some vague sense of revenge against a system that isn’t serving them; for others, he is (they think) their ‘useful’ idiot; and for the Evangelical crowd, he is the false prophet, the Antichrist which will bring forth their ultimate Salvation. For all of the (completely justified) hatred directed at him, he is but a symptom of a much larger problem of a society that has broadly lost confidence in basic institutions of democratic governance (and not entirely without justification) although I think burning down the house to drive out the vermin not an well-considered solution.
Stranger
Or, he is their Cyrus, a flawed, non-believer leader who has still been chosen by God to enact his will.
I did not realize that Justice Department personnel had already spoken (anonymously) to the New York Times about how the election-interference case was pursued.
Here is the rest of the story, as revealed by dozens of interviews:
Department officials in 2021 never imagined that Trump would have a shot at regaining the presidency in 2024. Thus it did not factor into their timetable.
The Department opted to prioritize the investigation and prosecution of the hundreds of individual rioters. It turned into the largest investigation the Department had ever done. This meant that the human resources needed to investigate Trump’s inner circle were lacking.
Democrats in the House, frustrated with the Department’s pace, launched their own investigation in June 2021. Unlike the Department, House Democrats focused squarely on Trump’s inner circle.
The Department spent much of 2021 trying to find financial links between Trump’s allies and the rank-and-file rioters. This line of inquiry went nowhere.
“It would take the department nearly a year to focus on the actions contained in the indictment ultimately brought by Jack Smith, the special counsel Mr. Garland later named to oversee the prosecution: systematic lies about election fraud, the pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence, the effort to replace legitimate state electors with ersatz ones.”
The Department started investigating Trump and issuing related subpoenas around the spring of 2022. The subsequent stonewalling by witnesses – who were mostly allied with Trump – was “by far the most time-consuming and frustrating element of the investigation.”
I do think the Justice Department (and / or the media) could do a better job of communicating to the American people that they are, in fact, hard at work on the process. I mean, yes, this would influence the election, but this is not opinion or politicking: these are facts, and facts SHOULD influence votes.
A ten-year investigation that would have borne fruit had the elderly criminal not died of old age in the meantime isn’t really all that valuable a use of resources. As it stands, even if it went to trial today, I worry that Trump’s lawyers could evade consequences by arguing that his diminished capacity should limit any punitive aspects, including imprisonment. Again, as shown upthread, I don’t understand the ins and outs of all this, so maybe this is groundless.
Well, with his exercise- driving a golf cart- and diet- McDonalds- that might not be too long. But if trump loses Merchan will sentence him asap. If trump wins, the sentence will not be hard time.
Jumping in late here. Sorry if these points have been made.
We’re supposed to be a democracy. We shouldn’t need the government to protect us from bad Presidents. We shouldn’t be giving the government the power to decide who we elect.
When we, as a nation, elect somebody like Donald Trump, it’s our own responsibility and our own fault. We shouldn’t be complaining that nobody stopped us.
Just a few times. 
But repeating it does no harm either.
Sadly, given the rest of the MAGA portions of our government, who do have a written duty to do so as well, abandoning their responsibility, and the same group’s efforts to disenfranchise anyone who isn’t in the cult…
Well, let’s say we may wish the founders had put in a few more WRITTEN protections from our own government for the current SCOTUS to ignore.
The Founders had their own provincial views regarding of whom freedoms and privileges, such as voting or self-determination, should be recognized, and many would not be far afield from the White Christian Nationalists of the present. They also mostly viewed the Constitution (with the first ten amendments) to be in service of preventing government overreach over individual freedoms and state prerogatives (again, restricted to certain classes of person) rather than preventing autocracy at the top level, which they saw as a responsibility of legislators to keep the presidency weak, while the judiciary kept laws in check. It was probably a pretty good system circa 1800 but the fragilities have been exposed in the two and a quarter centuries since. A populace voting for its own subservience to power isn’t really going to be stopped by any law, and certainly not when people for whom the law is just a rock to be ignored are voted into power.
Stranger
We failed the first test when we elected an open authoritarian. We appear to be failing the second test by allowing his attempt to steal democracy to go unpunished. If we wind up actually failing the second test, the door will be open to future presidents who may not be as openly authoritarian to keep trying these tactics until they work.
Quoting the NYT:
These are the delays that have me pissed off. Yes, I understand investigations like this take a long time, but they didn’t even get serious about investigating Trump and his cronies until 2022. If they’d started the day Garland was confirmed, he could well have been tried and found guilty of the Jan. 6 fraud charges by now.
No, I don’t believe he would.
Do you not see that it’s the media that introduced this false notion into the narrative that it’s up to the DOJ to regard political deadlines? This is not how the DOJ has ever done its work. Some rando reporter assigns blame that DOJ did not complete its investigation timely with the 2024 election, and suddenly it’s fashionable to blame the DOJ for Trump not being convicted in advance of the election.
Please, show me one single instance where DOJ conducted any investigation ever based on an election time table.
Further, the DOJ did its job. They investigated. They presented their evidence to Merrick Garland. Garland determined that the evidence merited indictments against Trump. He appointed Jack Smith as his prosecutor for the case. Smith prosecuted.
The case was humming along with comparative speed – until Trump appealed to the Supreme Court on the immunity issue. And it was the SCOTUS that sat on the case for 7 months before issuing a bullshit ruling that not only built more delay into getting to trial, but they ensured that the matter would be appealed back to them again after Judge Tanya Chutkan complies with their initial ruling to sort out what fell under their vague guidance for immunity and what didn’t.
Think the Supreme Court will sit on its ruling a second time? Perhaps for another 7 months? I’m going to speculate they will.
You know, the DOJ has been hammered relentlessly by Trump. Trump’s intent is to undermine confidence in this institution. His efforts appear to be quite fruitful.
They make mistakes. Things don’t always go as they may have hoped. They’re understaffed and underfunded. But they are not the problem or the honest reason why Trump remains at large. Look to much higher corrupted authorities to assign blame for that. Or more basically, look around you at your fellow citizens who just couldn’t – can’t or choose not to – see what a grave mistake it was to elect someone like Trump in the first place.
Trump figured out ways to game the laws that no one had tried to game before. Just look at the emoluments clause–we thought it was sufficient because no previous president had ever dared to test it, and certainly not as boldly as he dared. And he found out that, with a compliant congress and judiciary, there was effectively no emoluments clause. It could not be enforced, no one had standing, and so he could accept all sorts of money from all sorts of foreigners, and we couldn’t do a thing to stop him.
The DoJ isn’t the problem–our reluctance to build safeguards into the law to prevent things that haven’t happened yet is the problem. The DoJ is trying to cope with that failing, sometimes succeeding, but most times not.
Obviously this is going to be impossible to find unless you can find another case of a suspect planning to get elected in order to evade punishment.
Trump’s crimes aren’t comparable to what the doj is usually up against. This is why the caution with moving to seek warrants, prosecution, subpoenas, etc from the Republican operatives who we knew connected trump to the post 2020 fraud efforts was such a failure.
And btw, Im thinking about making a longer post about it but the claim that Jack Smith was just the guy who prosecuted after the doj had already gathered the evidence it needed is extremely misleading. In reality as special counsel he oversaw both investigation and prosecution.
Sure, once he was appointed. But investigation was going on prior to that appointment, and Smith wasn’t overseeing that.
I first saw that one in The Mythical Man-Month.
Trump figured something out? I doubt it. I question whether Trump is capable to tying his shoes.
What happens is Trump just wanders around, oblivious to what’s going on. And the Republican party is constantly working to protect him from any possible consequences for whatever he happens to do.
Which illustrates the real problem in American politics. It’s not Trump; it’s the political organization that makes it possible for there to be a Trump.
And that political organization will still be there, fully functional, working for the next guy after Trump is gone.
I didn’t need the media to introduce this notion. I came up with it all by myself.
And while standard DOJ operating procedures may not consider political deadlines, I believe this is one instance where they should have, because the people involved were actively trying to overthrow an election. People who actively try to overthrow an election should be considered likely to try to overthrow future elections, and preventing overthrown elections should be a top DOJ priority.
Or, more bluntly, I wish Biden and Garland had said We’ve got three and half years to nail these fuckers before they try it again. Let’s do it.
Would the extra year or so have actually helped convict Trump by now? No, you’re right, probably not. But the fact that they squandered a year before even making it a priority looks pretty lame.
But now you’re right back to the point @Aspenglow and others brought up. What they did is in your mind, my mind, and probably all of the participants of the thread a crime. But it wasn’t yet investigated in detail or proven. Now you’re saying you want retribution ahead of proof, which is, IMHO, not the “true” rule of law you and others have claimed should be followed.
Look - emotions are high, as are our fears. And maybe we’re past the point of doing the right thing when we have proof (in our minds at a minimum, but substantial evidence) that the other party is going to toss the law right out the window on day one. But let’s not pretend that such actions would be justice as defined by the USA legal system.
The system is rigged? Broken? Obsolete? Sure, most of us have said as much. But as written, you’d want us to jettison it first before the SCOTUS proved just how badly the fix was in. 20/20 hindsight is burning a hole in all of our guts, but isn’t the right frame to judge what the DOJ was doing 3.5 years ago.
Where did I say anything like that?
When a two-month campaign of falsehoods and rabble-rousing culminates in a mob breaching the Capitol and trying to murder the Senate, it shouldn’t take a great legal mind to surmise that crimes may have been committed not just by the rioters but by the people who gave them cause to riot.
Yet … (again quoting the NYT)
WHY?